Subject: Re: [lojban] slashdot.org gives Lojban a push

From: Brook Conner <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 02 May 2000 11:39:27 -0400

la daniel. cucku di'e 
> la lojbab. cusku di'e
> 
> > I just found out that Lojban was merely mentioned in a topic of
> discussion
> > on slashdot.org a few days ago. The result has been a phenomonal set
[...]
> That's known as the "slashdot effect". Well, more correctly, the
> slashdot effect pertains to the downing of web servers that are well
> suited to the load normally imposed on them, when those servers get hit
> by a million geeks in one day after the site was mentioned in a slash
> dot front article.

This *was* a front article - lojban.org is lucky it didn't die. Had the
story been more "newsy" than the "Ask Slashdot" one about a "common
Internet language", then we probably would have gotten a lot more hits.

As it was, most of the discussion was along the lines of the usual
naysayers on auxlang and such - no artificial language will become a
worldwide standard, because it's too hard to replace the one that is
already there (English, usually).

Now, if I ever get around to that programatic semantics for lojban and
it produces something truly interesting and useful (or at least amusing
- e.g., using Doom or Quake as a sysadmin tool gets a lot of attention
on /.), then /. would really pay attention.

Hmmm, now here's a thought - Lojban as a speakable replacement for
Perl..... For sure you can't speak Perl - too much punctuation. Stuff
like $_ =~ s/\//::/g is legitimate perl - roughly this means "Replace
every / with a :: in the most recently relevant string." This is
something that could quite certainly be said in lojban exactly. Gonna
have to think on this one and post some more details later.

[...] 

> > Oh, kinda interesting is that the hits on the 29th came from 63
> different
> > country domains, including such places as Christmas Island and Niue.
> 
> Hmm, we may finally get a truly international audience on the list. This
> may prove interesting. Three cheers to slashdot if it really happens!

Yeah - /. is a global audience, though (not surprisingly) skewed to
North America, and can bring down sites anywhere in the world. One
recent mainstream article (Forbes?) mentioned a site in South Africa
that got slashdotted. The sysadmins went on about how all of a sudden
(to the minute of the story appearing on /.) they had thousands of crazy
penguins streaming across the Atlantic, and they had a couple of months
worth of hits in a few hours.

> > I am not sure I ever heard of slashdot.org before this. But
> > obviously a lot of people read it seriously.
> 
> You betcha. It's THE geek site on the internet. And your comment above
> disproves the alleged geekiness of lojban: How can lojban be a geek
> language when the head of the LLG doesn't even know about /. ?

Hahahaha!

Yep - kind of like my favorite "geek test" - one "question", and if you
laugh, you're a geek:

"You see a Volkswagon Beetle with a license plate that reads 'FEATURE'"

Brook